Boy saved from abuse as RCMP make major child porn bust in Prairies, North

Darren Parisien

ROY ANTAL/The Canadian Press

Saskatoon Police Service Sgt. Darren Parisien addresses a news conference in Regina on Wednesday. A boy in Saskatoon has been rescued as part of a multi-agency police investigation that targeted online child predators.

REGINA — Police say a boy in Saskatchewan was rescued from years of abuse during a police investigation that targeted online child predators on the Prairies and the North.

The RCMP’s Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children announced Wednesday that 21 people have been arrested and 16 of them charged so far as part of Operation Snapshot. The charges include invitation to sexual touching, internet luring, indecent exposure and accessing and distributing child pornography.

Det. Sgt. Darren Parisien, who led the operation, said hundreds of thousands of images were found on more than 100 computers or hard drives and 1,000 disks.

“The vast majority involve children under the age of 12,” Parisien said at a news conference in Regina.

“But more and more increasingly, we’re dealing with images of infants, toddlers ... children who can’t even speak. That’s becoming a disturbing trend that we’re seeing in a lot of cases and certainly that was present in a number of the investigations involved with this project.”

Ten of the people charged are in Saskatchewan, four are in Alberta and two are in Manitoba. More arrests and charges are expected.

“Our preliminary investigations are showing that some of these offenders had massive collections of child pornography and have been building these collections for years,” said Regina police Staff Sgt. Ron Weir, who is the co-ordinator of the Saskatchewan Internet Child Exploitation Unit.

Weir said it’s not that Saskatchewan has more sexual predators than other parts of the country. Authorities in Saskatchewan just had more resources to dedicate to the project, he said.

In the case of the boy in Saskatoon, police said he was abused by a family member’s roommate. The abuse started five years ago, when the boy was about eight or nine years old, and ended when police executed a search warrant last June.

A man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the boy, has already pleaded guilty and been sentenced to 30 months in jail.

Parisien would not specifically say how the alleged sexual predators were found for fear of driving them to another technology or location. He did say that officers went to places such as file-sharing networks where pornography was traded. They also posed as children or other predators.

Parisien said every picture or video has clues — such as clothing, location or a language spoken by a child — that could help authorities find other children.

“We try to identify and locate every child in every picture and video we can,” said Parisien.

“Obviously that is a huge task in the hundreds of thousands of images that were seized just in this one four-month project. There would be thousands of different children involved from every corner of the world. And some of those we will have no possible avenue of even knowing where in the world they were.

“But we’re hopeful that some of those other images can give clues to help identify these children and take them out of situations where they’re being abused.”

Parisien cautioned that many of the images did not appear to come from overseas.

“Most of the images that we’re seeing now are homegrown,” he said.

“This isn’t a problem where it’s coming from other locations. A lot of the child sexual abuse material is being produced through the victimization of children right here in Canada and certainly in North America.”